so--and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place
he loses some "females"--as he always calls women--in the edge of a wood
near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to
show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid
people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannonblast, and a
cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their
feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different
with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he
doesn't strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball
across the plain through the dense fog and find the fort. Isn't it a
daisy? If Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature's ways of doing
things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For
instance: one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced
Chicago, I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through
the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor
I could ever have guessed out the way to find it. It was very different
with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running
stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were
that person's moccasin-tracks. The current did not wash them away, as it
would have done in all other like cases--no, even the eternal laws of
Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of
woodcraft on the reader.

We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's
books "reveal an extraordinary fulness of invention." As a rule, I am
quite willing to accept Brander Matthews's literary judgments and applaud
his lucid and graceful phrasing of them; but that particular statement
needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart, Cooper
hadn't any more invention than a horse; and I don't mean a high-class
horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse. It would be very difficult to
find a really clever "situation" in Cooper's books, and still more
difficult to find one of any kind which he has failed to render absurd by
his handling of it. Look at the episodes of "the caves"; and at the
celebrated scuffle between Maqua and those others on the table-land a few
days later; and at Hurry Harry's queer water-transit from the castle to
the ark; and at Deerslayer's half-hour with his first corpse; and at the
quarrel between Hurry Harry and Deerslayer